Book Review: Olympos

2005, Dan Simmons

I'm travleing a lot, so I'm reading a lot. I make it a point not to try to work on airplanes but to do pleasure reading as much as possible. I read Dan Simmon's second half of the Illium story called Olympos. I tried to explain to Jim what it was about:

It's set in the year 5000 or so, there are only a couple of 100,000 actual physical people left on the planet after everyone of the post-humans ascended or something. The remaining humans are basically post-literate circuit boys and girls who live for exactly 100 years in bliss then supposedly ascend. Makes sense right? It turns out that they are just killed and all the posts are gone, except for a handful which are trapped in a blue beam of light in Jerulislam. Well, there are also real Olympian gods living on a real Olympus on a terraformed Mars (which is also host to a race of photosynthisizing beings called zeks which spend their time making Easter Island Statues for some reason). The Olympian Gods shuttle back and forth through spacetime to Troy in 2000 BC where they are staging the real Trojan War. Somehow the immortal gods with real powers haven't read the Illiad and they have resurrected a bunch of 20-22nd centruy Homer scholars to document it for them (since they also can't read anymore). In the mean time it turns out the entire cast of Shakespear's Tempest are are/post humans/computer avatars and are sort of running the Earth's infrastrucutre but seem to be running it into the ground. Oh and mechanical life has been evolving all this time on the moons of Jupiter since it started as a mining colony in the 21st century. They're investing what the hell is going on with Mars since in 5000AD it's been teraformed and there are gods living on it and the gods are somehow threatening quatum reality. Then it gets weird...

Jim: I see. How long has this been going on.
Mark: I read the first one last year....
Jim: No. How long have the brain worms been back?
Mark: ... I can see why you might think that...

Olympos builds on Illium in the usual Dan Simmons way, introduces more plot complications (inlcuding, I think, several pointless ones) but does, in fact, wrap the whole package up into a single, comphrensive story that almost makes sense. Almost. If you like Dan Simmons, you'll like this but if you've never read him, go ready Hyperion, which is better, makes more sense, and gives you a better feel of what Dan is like at his height. The Illium story is good, but it seems like an echo of Hyperion.